Lorne Gunter: Dear WikiLeaks, please tell me something I don’t know

WikiLeaks keeps dribbling out diplomatic cables from the stash of 251,000 it was given by someone in the U.S. government, perhaps Pfc. Bradley Manning. Sunday’s big revelation was that Israel is preparing for a large-scale Middle East war on the theory that it is easier to scale-down to a smaller scale conflict — if one arises — than to ramp up to a large one.

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, reportedly told an American Congressional delegation in Nov. 2009, “I am preparing the Israeli army for a large-scale war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite.”

Seriously, you’ve been at your latest round of leaks for a month now and while I can’t claim to have heard before everything you’ve divulged — I didn’t, for instance, know that Russia had sold anti-aircraft missiles to Venezuela — nothing you’ve revealed is surprising. Not one thing.

Geez, Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan is corrupt!? Colour my purple with shock!

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is risk-averse. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin fancies himself an “alpha dog.” Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a sleazoid who is too cozy with the Russians. Nicolas Sarkozy of France is a “naked emperor.” And some U.S. diplomat likened Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler.

Say it ain’t so.

Here’s the most salient stat from the WikiLeaks saga. I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: Not one of the quarter-million documents — not a single one — is classified “top secret,” and just 6% are even “secret.”

These are yawners, not game-changers.

Gen. Ashkenazi may not have wanted his war-preps made broadly public, but he told them to U.S. Congressmen, so he mustn’t have meant for them to be extra confidential.

When I have written this before, I have been inundated with e-mails from WikeLeaks supporters claiming in the most profane and angry terms that I just don’t understand. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, my correspondents insist, are making the world safer and more peaceful by crippling America’s war machine and intelligence services.

It must be the emailers’ youth or lefty naivete that allows them to convince themselves that what WikiLeaks has done has more significance than the celebrity gossip divulged daily on TMZ and other tattler shows. They want fervently for WikiLeaks to bring about significant changes in the way the world works. Moveover, they worship the site’s founder, Ultra-ego Julian Assange.

Or maybe I am too old and cynical.

But the fact that Israel is preparing for the worst, yet expecting something less than the worst from its hostile neighbours is hardly the stuff scoops are made of.

There’s a reason WikiLeaks has fallen from view in the news in the past two weeks, and the reason is not media obsession with Christmas. Rather, WikiLeaks is no longer headline news because people have come to understand there is nothing significant in the site’s revelations.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.